Sniping the Cockpit

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No matter how badass your Cool Tank, Cool Plane, or Humongous Mecha may be, its crew is still often made up of flesh-and-blood human beings who, once you get past the vehicle's armor plating, are just as vulnerable to damage as any other. Enemies who have Armor Piercing weaponry may come to realize that they can stop your rampaging murder machines with just a few well-placed rounds to the cockpit. In the same manner that a well-placed shot to the head can instantly kill a human being, an attack that deliberately targets and kills the pilot can stop a vehicle without having to exert the time, energy, and resources to reduce it to scrap metal.

This is common in newer First-Person Shooter games, where killing the pilot or other crew can take the vehicle or some of its weapons out of action until those stations can be manned again. Sometimes, especially if the vehicle itself has a Crew of One, it can also be used so that the opposing force can hijack the vehicle and turn it against its owners.

In an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, the pilot of an armed attack helicopter suffers from a (deliberately induced) heart attack, which causes the A.I. in his aircraft to malfunction and refuse to acknowledge stand-down orders since it believes the brain-dead pilot is still in control. Once Saito puts a round through the comatose pilot's head, the A.I. takes back full control and returns the aircraft back to base on its own.

In the Mazinger trilogy — Mazinger Z, Great Mazinger and UFO Robo Grendizer — aiming for the cockpit (clearly visible in the two first robots) is a common tactic constantly employed by villains... and the army when the Government turns on the heroes (which also is an alarmingly common occurrence). In fact, it happened in the first Mazinger-Z manga chapter (Mazinger went on a rampage due to Kouji thinking Falling into the Cockpit was a good idea. Several tanks attacked Mazinger, deliberately aiming for the cockpit). And in a Great Mazinger manga episode, a Warbeast is holding Great Mazinger still as Marquis Janus orders to snipe the cockpit. However, the Humongous Mecha builders had the cockpits specially reinforced to protect the pilot.

In the first episode, Amuro dispatches the second Zaku that attacked Side 7 by stabbing it through the cockpit with his beam saber - the first one he just cut in half, causing its reactor to go critical and subsequently punch a hole right through the side of the colony.

Mobile Suit Gundam 0080: War in the Pocket similarly has its final battle end with the Alex's beam saber stabbed through the cockpit of Bernie's Zaku, though unlike Amuro's second kill in the original series it still blows up anyway.

Macross Zero: The introduction of D.D. Ivanov, one of the primary antagonists, is this. Captain Roy Focker had just saved a newbie from getting Macross Missile Massacre'd to death, and said newbie gets sniped in the cockpit for Roy's trouble.

Macross Delta: This is how Messer meets his end, as Keith fires a burst from his nose cannon directly into the cockpit. This is indicated to be a deliberate shot rather than a fluke, highlighting the White Knight'sinhuman skill at flying.

In Attack on Titan the weak spot at the base of a Titan's neck turns out to be where their human body, specifically the head, is located.

Comic Books

The Saint of Killers from Preacher pulls off several of these against a tank battalion. Of course, his magic guns (which were forged by Satan himself from the Angel of Death's sword) are guaranteed to never miss and always inflict fatal wounds no matter who or what they're aimed at, so really all he has to do is point, fire, and somehow someone is going to die. Whether it's by going through the tank's periscope, hitting and blowing up a round in the tank's gun, or simply by penetrating the armor, it's immaterial.

Referenced and averted in Sin City: To Hell And Back. One Mook tries this on Wallace. Wallace notes that it only works in the movies and that the mook should aim for the car, instead of the driver.

In the Commando story "Crackshot Craig", the eponymous Craig is an ex-SAS marksman who gets caught up in a civil war in an unnamed South American country. When the rebel stronghold is attacked by government forces, Craig manages to shoot down a light-attack aircraft by killing the pilot with an antique Lee-Enfield rifle.

Judge Dredd: In the "Helter Skelter" story, the bad guys send two H-wagons (massively armored flying gunships) after Judge Dredd and the scientist they need to complete their plans. Dredd takes one of them out by shooting the pilot with an ordinary Lawgiver gun.

In chapter six Tess hits the crew compartment of an Orion interceptor with one of the USS Bajor's aft phaser strips. The ship goes out of the fight on a ballistic course. A few minutes later she duplicates it with a quantum torpedo salvo to the bridge of an Orion corvette, although this is frankly overkill.

Tess seems to have a habit of this: in Two Sides of a Coin she fatally damages a Tal Shiar D'deridex-class battlecruiser with a precision shot to the bridge after battering its shields down, causing it to go out of control and crash into an asteroid. Eleya even refers to it as "taking a headshot".

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Films — Live-Action

In Return of the Jedi, this leads to the loss of the Super Star Destroyer Executor as a result of a Taking You with Me attack from a crippled Rebel starfighter plowing into the bridge. The massive ship was sent careening out of control and crashed into the Death Star.

In the World War I movie Flyboys, many of the pilots are killed in their cockpits. In the final fight the hero kills the German Ace with a well-placed shot from a revolver while they are flying side-by-side.

Used in Avatar when the natives couldn't destroy the tiltrotors or Powered Armor wholesale, but could throw spears with sufficient heft to pierce the cockpits.

Capt. Hale in Broken Arrow takes out the first helicopter by shooting the pilot through the cockpit glass. The pilot keels over the controls, the chopper turns over, crashes, and explodes.

This trope is brought up in Independence Day, where Dr. Okun is asked by the president if the alien invaders can be killed. He replies that "Their bodies are just as frail as ours ... You just have to get past their technology, which is, I'm sorry to say, far more advanced".

In the opening mission of Flight of the Intruder, the protagonist's navigator is shot through the throat by a carefully aimed shot fired by a VC armed with a bolt-action rifle, after surviving a hail of ack-ack fire. In the original book, it was a one-in-a-million accident from the VC firing into the air in the rough direction of their A-6.

Attempted by Lursa and B'etor in Star Trek: Generations when they order their gunner to target the Enterprise's bridge. Unfortunately for them, the Enterprise crew technobabbles their shields down first and puts a torpedo into their reactor.

In Pacific Rim, the war between humanity and the Kaiju took a turn for the worse when the Kaiju begin targeting the pilots inside of the Jaegers more directly.

Red Tails: 332nd pilot Lightning and German ace Pretty Boy end up machine-gunning each other's cockpits in a head-to-head pass at the climax. Pretty Boy dies almost instantly, but we're left watching Lightning slowly bleed out in his cockpit as his plane slowly falls to a fiery crash.

Literature

Shooting the pilots is noted to be an effective tactic against Ork flyers in the Ciaphas Cain novel The Last Ditch. One of the 597th's troopers, the accident-prone "Jinxie" Penlan, once did it by accident when she used the butt of her lasgun as a mallet and it went off.

In Halo: First Strike, Linda-058 snipes down several Banshee pilots by shooting them through the tiny crack between their Banshees' body and canopy. While hanging upside down and firing one-handed.

Tycho Celchu's trademark in the X-Wing Series is doing this with full-sized starfighter guns.

In the eighth book of the series, Isard's Revenge, Wedge lands a cockpit shot on an AT-AT.

In the tenth book, Friendly Sniper Wran Narcassan brings down a distant flying vehicle with a single shot through its pilot.

In Harry Turtledove's World War series, aliens invade in the middle of World War II. While the Lizards have technology and vehicles far superior to WWII era tanks and planes, they're still vulnerable to things like a tank commander getting his head blown off when he sticks his head out of the hatch.

L. Bob Rife: Its bulletproof! Haw! Hiro: No it isnt, as the rebels in Afghanistan found out.

Semi-averted in the Star Wars: Jedi Knight novella. Kyle Katarn attempts to shoot a TIE Fighter that's chasing the Moldy Crow with his blaster pistol. It does nothing but leave a large crack in the fighter's viewport. Said crack did completely wreck the pilot's vision, however, causing him to crash into a wall.

Happens on occasion in Dogfights, but the most prominent example is during the episode "Kamikaze", where a US Navy Wildcat pilot manages to hit the cockpit of a kamikaze "Kate" torpedo bomber and help relieve pressure on the USS Laffey.

In Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck pulls off a variant of this against a Cylon raider she is duelling. Given the nature of the Raiders in this setting, however, this also overlaps with Boom, Headshot!.

In the Stargate SG-1 episode "48 Hours", Teal'c takes down an al'kesh bomber by shooting the cockpit. With the gun froma Death Glider. As the bomber was manned by his much-hated enemy Tanith, Teal'c was quite satisfied with himself.

While it's not exactly attacking the pilot as such, robots in both Robot Wars and BattleBots have occasionally been disabled and eliminated by having their transmission receivers attacked and damaged, leaving the machine functionally intact and operable but preventing the driver from controlling it any further and knocking it out. While machines with visible external aerials would most often fall victim to this by having them snapped or cut off, on rare occasions a precision axe blow or piercing spike would go through armour and take out an internal receiver.

Music Videos

In the Gorillaz clip for "On Melancholy Hill", Noodle manages to hit the cockpit of one of the pirate planes attacking her cruise ship with her machine gun, sending it crashing into the sea.

Tabletop Games

Largely averted in BattleTech. While head hits will hurt a Mech's pilot and may knock him or her out (and the head is usually the weakest spot on the whole giant armored war machine, period), actually aiming for the head is almost impossible unless the pilot is already unconscious or the reactor has shut down. However, as technology and firepower have advanced through rediscovered Lost Technology and new innovations, this can happen by chance much more often; there are a number of "headchopper" weapons like the Gauss Rifle that can kill any mech with a single lucky hit on the head.

Defied by the Tau in Warhammer40000. The heads of their Mini-Mecha are just redundancy camera pods, and the pilot's head is buried deep in the mech's chest.

Played straight for anyone who is not a Tau pilot. Tau railgun punches through the cockpit, and the momentum from it is such that the body of the pilot is sucked through the projectile's exit hole. The result is a long trail of gore and viscera which was the unfortunate pilot.

In Command & Conquer: Generals, the GLA hero unit Jarmen Kell can snipe pilots out of vehicles, leaving behind the unoccupied vehicle that can then be captured by a friendly infantry grunt. In Zero Hour, the Chinese Nuke Cannon artillery does the same thing when equipped with neutron shells, only on a larger scale.

Similarly, Natasha Volkova from Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 is able to snipe the operator of a vehicle, at which point any infantry unit can hop in.

In the MechWarrior series, destroying the cockpit of a battlemech is one of the fastest ways to take it out of action, but hitting the tiny, bouncing target requires extreme precision. In the Mercenaries series of Expansion Packs and in Mech Commander, taking out a mech by killing the pilot is a great way to make the most money off of battlefield salvage - a blown out cockpit is far cheaper to replace than a damaged reactor - and allows you to get heavy or assault mechs very early in the game. In Mechwarrior Living Legends, killing the pilot opens it up the mech for a friendly Powered Armor player to steal and return to base for repairs or salvaging.

Battlezone had a sniper rifle precisely to allow the player to do this. It was limited to three shots and difficult to aim due to how the scope was implemented, but if you scored a hit you could steal anything short of walkers, including superheavy bombers. The sniper rifle returns in the sequel, Combat Commander, gaining infinite regenerating ammo at the cost of being incapable of penetrating the heavily reinforced cockpits of heavier vehicles.

Killing the pilot is one way to score a victory in Red Baron. As in Real Life, the open cockpits of many planes provide relatively little protection to the crew.

In Battlefield 2, the M95 sniper rifle and (occasionally) rockets are capable of bypassing the bulletproof cockpit glass of helicopters and jets, and killing the pilot.

This also works in Battlefield 3, as beautifully demonstrated in this vid. Most helicopters' windshields are bulletproof though, so it can only be done with sniper rifles or vehicle mounted machine guns. The Scout Helicopter's windshield is not bulletproof however, so you can just spray at it hoping to kill the pilot.

Tanks in World of Tanks have a crew that can be killed in battle. If the entire crew is dead, then the tank is effectively out of the fight, even if the tank itself is still in one piece.

In Crysis, the only way to take an enemy vehicle is to kill its crew. A few well placed shots can net you an undamaged vehicle.

Silent Scope justifies this since the player only uses a sniper rifle. In one level you can take down a Harrier jet in one shot by scoring a headshot on either pilot - in another car chase level you can render everyone in a car ineffective by shooting the driver. This includes the boss, who attacks by trying to run you down with a hijacked semi. The helicopter miniboss in the same level is a subversion, as you take it down by shooting its rotor shaft rather than the cockpit.

In Mass Effect 3, Cerberus's giant Atlas mechs are somewhat vulnerable to this trope — while, as the codex entry suggests, their giant crystal canopies are less vulnerable than they ought to be, they can be broken. In singleplayer, Shepard can then Gundamjack the unit in question. (However, since its canopy has been shot out, he's now equally vulnerable...)

In Halo: Combat Evolved, the powerful Scorpion tank has the driver's head completely open to the air. Since the tank is so slow, a sniper can kill the driver quite easily. This bit of idiotic vehicle engineering was rectified in subsequent games by adding a metal hatch to deflect sniper bullets. Still, if the tank takes enough damage, the cockpit hatch will fall off, allowing for an easy sniper kill once again.

From Halo: Reach onward, you can use a sniper weapon to 1-hit-kill Banshee pilots if you can get your shot through the tiny crack between the Banshee's canopy and body. Mind you, Banshees are agile air vehicles, with Halo 5: Guardians making it even harder snipe their pilots by giving the Banshees recharging energy shields.

In Borderlands 2, some bandit enemies will pilot airborne vehicles called Buzzards. Shooting the pilot will result in a critical hit. However, since Buzzards are almost constantly in motion, it's extremely difficult to get a good shot at the pilot unless you're very quick on the draw and it's coming right at you.

The interquel has something similar with the Dahl jetfighters, which have the cockpit windows as weak points. Also, the pilots of Dahl mech suits serve as the weak points of said mech suits.

In the game itself, this also happens to PJ, your second wingman, who is killed by a laser beam from Pixy's ADFX-01 Morgan.

Some Front Mission games allow you to do this, notably in Front Mission 3. Not only are there specific skills to do just this, but attaining hits to the torso region has a chance of damaging the pilot. Often, if the roll is particularly unlucky, a pilot can die from a single concentrated shotgun burst to the torso, leaving their Wanzer intact. Not only pragmatically useful (killing enemy pilots from otherwise strong Wanzers is one way to avoid prolonged combat), the fact that you can sell the captured Wanzers later makes for one heck of a Videogame Cruelty Potential.

Time Crisis 3's Stage 1 Area 3 has you riding in an ATV while shooting other enemies also in ATVs. Killing the driver of a vehicle causes the entire vehicle to spin out and crash, killing everyone else on it. It's faster than eliminating individual enemies or shooting the ATV itself, but if you're playing for score, you miss out on points gained from chain-shooting enemies.

In FTL: Faster Than Light, hitting a ship's room with non-ion weapons not only damages the ship's hull (unless it's a bomb) and systems, but also whatever crew happens to be inside. It is thus possible to kill off the crew of a ship with just your weapons rather than sending a Boarding Party, although in most cases the enemy ship will crumble from hull failure before the crew's lifebars are depleted. The Anti-Bio Beam is designed specifically for destroying enemy crew without damaging the hull, so a crew-kill, no-teleport victory is most feasible with it, but if the enemy ship has a medbay, it'll be useless unless you destroy the medbay.

In War Thunder, hitting the cockpit is a good way to take out enemy planes, especially heavily armored bombers. The US B-17 can lose 3 out of 4 engines and still fly, for starters, but if the pilot takes a bullet it's done for (maybe two if the pilots vitality stat is upgraded high enough).

Even more important with the ground forces part. If an ammo rack hit is not available, then aiming for a weak spot to take out the crew (ideally the gunner or driver) is the best course of action. A ground unit is also considered dead if you kill all but one of the crew. This is important; whilst almost all damaged parts can be restored to at least some functionality, dead crew tend to stay dead and it takes a few moments for surviving crew to take over and restore lost functions. The Sturmgeschutz Assault Guns in particular are very vulnerable to this tactic, as most of their crew is lined up on the left side of the vehicle; a round in the right place can immediately kill them all and thus One-Hit Kill the vehicle.

Operation Flashpoint and ARMA allow this, depending on the vehicle and the size of your gun. It's very difficult to pull off, of course; thankfully, you can also take out the engine or some other critical part instead, if simply denying it to the enemy is more important than using it yourself.

PlanetSide 1 had complete pilot protection against normal weapons - even, bizzarely, the completely exposed ATV riders - but a special Ancient Vanu weapon, the Radiator, lobbed out "grenades" that would create a ~5m wide bubble of lingering radiation that would go through walls and could kill vehicle occupants. Though the vehicle occupants had to be either an idiot or already wounded, as the Radiator was a Gradual Grinder and did very little damage per tick. Planetside 2 doesn't let players be killed while in enclosed cockpits, though you're free to shoot people off of their Flash, Harasser pickup bed, or Valkyrie rumble seats.

In Space Engineers, blasting off enemy cockpits is one the most effective ways to to kill enemy SpaceFighters; only the most hardcore armored fighters have enclosed cockpits, while everything else generally has the cockpit on the very front of the ship, ready to be blown off. Generally less viable against large ships, as players often mount multiple redundant control rooms and have it buried deep within the ship; it's generally more effective to target their reactor rooms or thrusters.

UberSoldier 2 has vehicle sections where you man a fixed gun, and are followed by enemy vehicles. You can blow them up with sustained firepower, or you can fire a few bullets at the driver and see the otherwise undamaged vehicle careen off and explode.

Games in the Saints Row series have this as a means of getting rid of aircraft. You could shoot helicopters so full of bullets that they catch fire and plunge to the ground in a big fireball, you could create a firework in the sky with some kind of explosive, but it's also possible to get one well-aimed shot in on the cockpit to achieve the same effect as the first method. The same thing can be done with airports in the second game. Shoot the pilot dead and watch the plane coast to a stop in front of you... or drop to the ground and explode.

In Elite Dangerous, the canopy on all starships can be shot out if the ship's shields are down. The canopy will crack before dramatically exploding outwards, causing your spacesuit helmet to automatically close and engage a limited duration life support system, giving you between 5 and 25 minutes depending on the upgrade level to land and repair. Of particular note is losing your canopy also causes you to lose most of your heads-up display, forcing pilots to eyeball their shots and guess their weapons ammo or Over Heating status.

James Bond: Agent Under Fire uses this as a Bond Move several times. Later games abandoned it for two reasons: first, the game's control scheme makes it really hard to do well; second, the game used it over and over through the last five or six levels.

Discussed in one between-mission cutscene in Ghost Recon: Future Soldier, where two members of the squad overhear Navy men in the messdeck talking about a sniper who shot down an enemy gunship by nailing the pilot through the canopy with one shot and promptly destroyed everything else under it when it came crashing down. Said squad members then imply that at least one of them (the sniper of the group) was there and responsible for that, with one noting that he remembers the "one shot" being with an RPG rather than a sniper rifle; they choose not to correct the story because "their version's better".

In Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain Quiet does this quite impressively to an enemy pilot following Snake in a jet fighter. Quiet did this while inside a helicopter. It was later spelled out exactly how badass this was, as she had to compensate for the movements of both moving vehicles, among other things.

In Fallout 4, taking out the pilot of a Vertibird causes an immediate crash-and-burn.

Empire Earth: the Partisan unit is able to shoot airplanes as in the Real Life entry below (and due to game mechanics, not just the early biplanes and triplanes either- they'll cheerfully shoot down futuristic nuclear bombers and supersonic fighters). While not a one-hit kill, it can come as a very nasty surprise to an enemy, since they can move through trees and can be produced in much greater quantities than an Anti-Air unit.

In From the Depths, the most heavily armored battleship can be taken out of action by destroying its AI mainframe, which is by default a high-priority target. As such, the ship designers usually bury the mainframe as deeply as possible in the hull, and some vessels even have multiple redundant mainframes to prevent lucky shots from completely nullifying expensive vessels.

Sniper Elite 3 and Sniper Elite 4 allow you to do this to any vehicle that you come across. Realism comes into play when considering armored vehicles, most of which have multiple occupants: take out the driver and it can't move, but it will still shoot at you. Take out the main gunner, and the coaxial machine gunner will still be able to shoot you. Taking out the occupants without destroying the vehicle allows you to covertly disable a nuisance: no one will know that the tank is full of dead bodies, and it won't explode to let everyone know you're there.

Subverted by the Hammer-Yang speedboat enemies in Metal Slug series. The pilots are exposed and are vulnerable to damage — as soon as they're shot, they die. However, the speedboat still attacks with its homing missiles despite the pilot being deceased, and the vehicle itself (which is far more durable) needs to be destroyed.

One of the final enemies to show up in the opening stage of the original Mega Man X are "Road Attackers", guys in red cars with plasma cannons on the hoods and spikes on the bumpers, who chase you down, firing the cannons and trying to run you over. Interestingly, they have multiple damage states depending on how much you hit them, and the first one takes out the driver - the car will keep rolling until you damage it a bit more, but without the driver it won't turn around to keep chasing you or fire its cannon at you, and can only damage you if you let it run you over.

Vehicles in TerraTech can be incredibly beefy, but destroying the cab and all the mounted AI modules will turn any tech into a pile of blocks. One of the first things players learn to do is hide their cabs.

In "Escape from Kadavo", a Zygerrian pilot shoots his fighter's laser cannons directly at a gunship's pilot, piercing the viewport and the pilot's head and causing the gunship to crash into the crater wall.

In "The Unknown", a Separatist raid party - consisting only of a droid gunship and jetpack-equipped Super Battle Droids - attacks a Republic medical shuttle carrying Tup (who has had a curious mental breakdown that resulted in him killing a Jedi) back to Kamino and its escort of ARC-170 fighters. The rocket droids eliminate the ARC-170s by climbing onto the nose and shooting the pilots while the gunship deploys some Buzz Droids to sabotage the shuttle, with the first few ripping off the viewport and spacing the pilots to death so the rest of the party can board the shuttle and steal Tup.

Real Life

World War I, being the first major conflict to feature air-to-air conflict, notably had many instances of this. Before someone figured out how to mount a machine gun on a plane, pilots and observers were required to take firearms along with them in the cockpit in case an opportunity to attack an enemy craft presented itself. Generally, the plane's engines had more protection than the cockpit so often enough a plane would be shot up but still flyable but the pilot was dead or wounded. Manfred von Richthofen, THERed Baron himself, was fatally wounded by an anti-aircraft machine gun but still managed to land his relatively unharmed plane before dying. Some early plane designs also had an unfortunate habit of showering their pilots in boiling hot oil or radiator coolant if the engines were shot up by enemy fire, indirectly leading to this.

During the Spanish Civil War, partisan snipers learned to shoot down low-flying fighter planes by targeting the cockpit.

British Spitfire pilots during World War 2 preferred shooting to destroy the enemy's aircraft without deliberately targeting the cockpit; They would also count a bailout as a "kill" as the aircraft was destroyed, even if the pilot wasn't. They considered this to be more "sporting". Polish and other European refugee Spitfire pilots, on the other hand, had absolutely no qualms about trying to turn the pilots of an enemy aircraft into burger meat with their machine guns, and would continue to fire on descending parachutes with the express intent of killing the pilot. Most of these refugee pilots had witnessed the brutality of the enemy first-hand and many of them had lost friends and family; They really wanted to make their enemy pay for what they'd done, chivalry be damned.

This has gotten more difficult as technology has advanced, but we have yet to come up with a material that is both transparent and as strong as high-grade steel, much less more exotic stuff like depleted-uranium or Chobham armour. Some types of bulletproof glass note which are actually polycarbonates rather than silicon-based also have an unfortunate tendency to deteriorate over time from exposure to direct sunlight and have to be replaced periodically; if the maintenance people goof the paperwork or replacements don't turn up on time, there's a problem.

During the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, there was a confirmed case of a Mujaheddin downing a Hind attack helicopter by killing the pilot with a Martini-Henry rifle left over from the British invasion in the previous century.

Generally averted during World War II, as better shielding for the pilot made it more efficient to destroy the plane's vital systems instead. However, the Japanese A6M Zero had an unarmored cockpit (make that an unarmored everything), which did wonders for its maneuverability and made it very successful early in the war, but got many pilots killed when they went up against later American fighter planes that combined heavy armor with similar maneuverability. About the only Zero pilots that survived to the end of the war were those who ordered armor plating added around the cockpit.

Owen J. Baggett, an American pilot, managed to shoot down a Zero with only an M1911 pistol while parachuting to the ground by firing at its cockpit.

Neutron bombs are designed to do this. Depleted uranium tank armor can withstand a tactical nuclear weapon detonated as close as a quarter-mile (400 meters). Depleted uranium will block blast, heat, gamma rays, poison gas, and pathogens. It is, however, worse than useless at shielding the crew from fusion neutrons, which instead of being captured or moderated by the armor, fast fission it, creating MORE radiation. Result: the tank is left intact, but the crew receives a fatal dose of radiation, and ideally at least 5-10 times the fatal dose (radiation poisoning kills slowly if you receive only one fatal dose, leaving the crew able to fight in the interim, but 5-10 fatal doses at once quickly cripple the victim and leads to a swift death). For this reason, Soviet tanks usually have fuel tanks near doors and other sections as well as water layers to trap neutrons. Still doesn't help against gamma radiation though.

Visibility from within an armoured vehicle is a lot better than it was fifty years ago, but CCTV systems only go so far, and can also get damaged. Sometimes you just have to stick your head out the hatch to use the Mk 1 eyeball and take your chances.

It is also possible for snipers to disable the advanced optics and force the crew to do this. Shooting out thermal sights is a primary role of snipers when going up against tanks.

During World War II, experience showed that tank commanders or gunners who stuck their heads out of an open hatch to see what was going on were much more likely to be killed, either from a sharpshooter or just from getting caught by the blast of anti-tank weapons. On the other hand, the same experience showed that the entire tank crew was more likely to die if nobody stuck their head out to see what possible threats were approaching in a blind spot.

In Mailed Fist, an account of tank fighting during WWII, tank commander John Foley recounts his near-miss with a German sniper, who ignored the fact that all of an infantry officer's body was in view, so that he could focus on the challenge of the tank commander who was only showing his head above the cupola. This wasn't necessarily bravado or showboating: a tank commander would have been a more valuable target than the infantry officer he was talking to.

Most major armies pre-World War II had anti-tank rifles in their arsenals. The technology was first adopted in 1918 during World War I as a counter to the newly introduced tanks and was fairly effective against the early, light armored, tanks. They were still mildly effective in the early years of World War II but increased armor on later tank models made them obsolete. Most were converted into anti-material weapons and used for disabling trucks and shooting through pillboxes.

The FAA has actually looked at the potential danger of this trope to airliners, but didn't deem it be that big of a risk. A .50 caliber sniper rifle would be the only widely available weapon capable of realistically pulling this off against an airliner, and it would take an astounding amount of aiming skills and luck to pull off. And it's even more unlikely that a sniper would be able to get a follow up shot on the copilot before the plane gained significant altitude.

Going with the theme of "disabling the vehicle by killing the crew", some modern antitank weapons are not designed to actually destroy the vehicle or even penetrate the armor, but just send a shockwave through the armor that causes pieces of it to break off and ricochet around inside the vehicle. This is known as "spalling" and tends to cause the tank's crew compartment to resemble a charnel house afterward.

The Soviet SU-152 self-propelled howitzer became well known for this in World War 2. Mounting an enormous 152mm cannon, a single hit with a high-explosive shell would typically kill a German tank , sometimes blowing the turret clean off! However, against the Elefant tank destroyer, which lacked a turret and was even more heavily armored than a Tiger, a single hit tended to kill the crew but leave the vehicle still operational, which the Soviets discovered when they caught German troops recovering "destroyed" Elefants and putting new crews into them. Soviet doctrine for using SU-152s against Elefants was promptly changed to "shoot it until the armor cracks open."

Officially these type of weapons are called HESH rounds, which stands for High Explosive Squash Head, and are designed not to pierce armor, but to create a massive blast wave that blows chunks of shrapnel from the inside of the tank's armor and onto the crew and any ammo or fuel in the way.

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